Khaing Lin had just left the hospital compound with a passenger in his taxi when he heard a fighter jet rumbling in the sky. Moments later, he felt the thunder of a bomb shake the ground. He immediately feared for his brother, another cabdriver who was still at the hospital, hoping to pick up a fare.
Nearly two days later, Mr. Khaing Lin had not found his brother’s body and was unsure if he ever would.
“I remember the smell of all the smoke and blood,” he said on Friday. “Not even hospitals are safe anymore”
Myanmar’s military on Wednesday night dropped two bombs on the Mrauk-U Hospital, which was a lifeline for many civilians in a rebel stronghold in the country’s western Rakhine State. The attack killed 34 people and injured at least 80 others, according to aid workers and rebel forces. Dozens of children were among those killed or injured.
The shocking attack came hours after the junta held an ostentatious ceremony in Myanmar’s capital to mark International Human Rights Day. It was the 67th attack on health care facilities in Myanmar this year, the World Health Organization said.
Family members of some of the victims were initially scared to claim the bodies of their loved ones, according to Wai Hun Aung, a volunteer aid worker. “People are terrified of the military,” he said while on a short break from retrieving whatever material was still useful from the debris of the largely ruined hospital.
Khaing Thu Kha, a spokesman for the Arakan Army, the rebel force that controls the area, said the hospital was only used by civilians and called the airstrike an “act of terror.” A doctor who worked at the hospital, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, also said that it catered only to civilians. Survivors, he said, were moved to another facility.
Volker Türk, the United Nations human rights chief, called the attacks a possible war crime.
Myanmar’s junta did not respond to requests for comment.
Rakhine State is an impoverished region where in 2017 an ethnic cleansing campaign by the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh. It was later labeled a genocide by the United States and the U.N.
Most of Rakhine State is now under control of the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine militia that has also faced accusations of persecuting the Rohingya. It is one of several rebel armies that the junta is fighting in the civil war that was ignited by a coup in 2021.
The hospital in Mrauk-U was a busy facility with 300 beds that had reopened only a couple of months ago, after rebel forces took control of the area last year. Doctors and nurses had returned to work, ending their participation in a nationwide strike that had started after the coup.
Many of those doctors and nurses are now dead, according to aid workers and rebel forces, decimating a crucial service in an isolated region.
Large parts of Myanmar have been ravaged by conflict over the nearly five years since the military coup, with millions displaced and thousands detained by the junta. The country’s health system, already underfunded during decades of previous military rule, has collapsed.
“It is difficult to convey how outraged M.S.F. is by the attack on one of the few remaining functioning medical facilities in the area,” Paul Brockmann, the manager of Myanmar operations for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement, referring to the group by its abbreviation in French.
“Bombing of health facilities, patients being killed in their beds, this cannot be perceived as collateral damage,” he said, adding, “Hospitals must remain a safe place for patients to receive medical care.”
The bombing came ahead of what the junta has billed as the first round of elections later this month. Opposition groups have widely rejected the planned vote as a tool to legitimize the power the military grabbed from a civilian administration in 2021, and the U.N. has called the elections a “sham.” A silent strike was held across Myanmar on Wednesday to oppose the elections, with normally busy roads largely deserted.
The junta has in recent weeks started to imprison critics of the vote and ramped up military offensives across the country.
Barely 24 hours after the attack on Mrauk-U Hospital, the military bombed a village in the south of Rakhine State, according to rebel forces and local news media. Airstrikes by military fighter jets and drones have increased by 30 percent from last year, according to a recent tally by ACLED, a conflict monitor.
Many of Mrauk-U’s survivors accused the military of attacking civilians in order to pressure the rebel forces.
“This is neither the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last,” said Mr. Khaing Lin, the taxi driver.
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